Analysis of the exhibition “Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe”

Museum of Modern Art, (MUMOK), Vienna, November 2009/February 2010

Marina Gržinić

The interest to make the analysis of this exhibition is threefold. It
allows, it is my point of departure, to talk about the New Europe, the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe and the new relation in
between capital and power. The show was curated by Bojana Pejić, art historian
who for the last two decades or so lives in Berlin and was an important
Belgrade figure back in the 1970s and 1980s when she was active in the Student
Culture Center in Belgrade and worked with prominent figures of the
neo-avantgarde art movements in Serbia associated with body art, alternative
culture, feminism (as Dunja Blažević, Biljana Tomić, Marina Abramović, Ješa
Denegri, etc.).

The exhibition in MUMOK was produced, that
means initiated and, what is even more important, financially made possible by ERSTE
Foundation. ERSTE Foundation is a foundation that manages, as it was exposed
several times at the opening of the exhibition and as well at its post opening
symposium, the ERSTE bank, and not vice versa, as we thought until then. This
makes an important difference as until now the analysis of projects produced by
ERSTE Foundation, and these are
numerous (bearing the brand of ERSTE), were always defined at least by us
theoreticians as “art and cultural interventions in the field of art and
culture” made by the Vienna-based multinational bank corporation ERSTE to “save”
its face for an invasive allocation of capital throughout Europe. This time we
got the lesson that a number of groups of interest established the ERSTE
Foundation that besides banking as
well produces cultural politics. But contrary to being hilarious over the
presented “change” of the bank position that was until now understood in an
opposite way, the new situation just reconfirms what was recently stated by
Santiago López Petit in his book Global Mobilization. Brief
Treatise for Attacking Reality (La movilización global. Breve tratado para
atacar la realidad)[1],namelythat today global
capitalism shows two major characteristics. One is that capitalism is
not an irreversible process but, as stated by Petit, a reversible and
conflictual event. Moreover, everything that is going on in the world today is
brought back to one single event, and this is neither the crisis nor Obama, but
what Petit calls theunrestrainment of
capital. Neoliberal globalization, which is the synonym of the global era, is
nothing more than the repetition
of this event only, the unrestrainment
of capital. The second is that, because the only limit of capital is capital
itself, the unrestrainment
of capital is not about something outside of it (as is said about the crisis,
being something “abnormal,” and also something that will bring capitalism to
its end); the unrestrainmentof capital simply means
something more than capital.

Petit links capital and power in the following ways: 1. Capital is
more (than) capital 2. Capital that is more than capital is power. Such a
relation presents a new situation between capital and power, which is named by
Petit as co-propriety capital/power. Such co-propriety capital/power needs a
medium in order to take place. We have three fundamental media
today where capital and power own each other: innovation, public space, and
war.

Co-propriety
of capital/power means owning (does not matter if only temporary) as well as
all possible other institutions from art, culture, health, education, and etc.
MUMOK is part of this relation, giving “freely,” so to say, all proper
capacities to the project in order to get money in return.

Before I
proceed into the analysis, it is mandatory to explain my own, as Goldie Osuri argues,[2]
double complicity in the project (as artist and panelist). I took part in the
exhibition with videos that I made in collaboration with Aina Šmid (with whom I
have been working together for the last 30 years as video and media artist) and
as a theoretician (writing and lecturing on the topic of art, theory,
politics), to talk at the Gender check post opening symposium at MUMOK. Following the opening of the exhibition a symposium “READING
GENDER. Art, Power and Politics of Representation in Eastern Europe” was organized in MUMOK. Prominent names from West
and East of Europe were invited to speak.

I can state that the analysis of past exhibition projects
curated by Bojana Pejić clearly revealed that serious problems are to be
expected. The most important reference for being preoccupied was Pejić ’s international
co-curatorial project, she prepared on an analogous topic of Eastern Europe and
arts, produced by a Western institution of contemporary art. The show was “After the Wall: Art and culture in
post-Communist Europe,” (1999/2000), being held at the Moderna Museet
/Museum of Modern art in Stockholm, Sweden, co-curated by Bojana Pejić and the
British curator and art historian David Elliot (in collaboration with Iris
Müller-Westermann, as project-leader); Elliot was the director of the Museum at
the time of the show. The show was among the first from the series of shows on
the topic of art, The Balkan and Eastern Europe that were organized in Germany,
Austria, and etc., in the course of the new millennium.

In our case, Gržinić/Šmid, After the Wall turned out to be a disaster as we were invited to
take part in it but had no place secured by the curator(s) to show our work,
and even more, what has become a symptom that repeats itself brutally whenever
Pejić is involved as curator, as it was the case with Gender check, a catalogue/reader has been published with a
ferocious policy imposed by the curator(s) in terms of selection who will (re-)publish
a text. In general, it is possible to be stated that one of the most obvious
way of working by Bojana Pejić that is repeated throughout her different
engagements in curatorial projects over the last decade is a brutal evacuation
and filtering of positions from the former ex-Yugoslav space. In the case of Gender check it was again a lost
opportunity to publish seminal works in the published catalogue of the show
that omits seminal texts by seminal writers from ex-Yugoslavia such as Žarana
Papić, Biljana Kašić, Nataša Govedić, Ana Vujanović, Zoe Gudović, etc., not to
mention all those from the old and new generations of feminists and queer from
Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and etc.

Therefore learning from After
the Wall exhibition, we (Gržinić/Šmid) first decided not to take part in
the exhibition Gender check but were
really pressured by Pejić herself and others to take part in it. The decision
was taken finally to take part when the possibility to talk at the panel was
put forward. As I was working for my own sake on the analysis of the exhibition
Gender check, reflecting on the show
from the title on, the chance to have a possibility to intervene in public (to
talk at the panel) was something that was not possible to reject. Specifically:
feminism is politics that can be
exercised today first and foremost as a political queer position in a public
space.

So what was said there (at the panel) in nuce is presented here as the core of
two theses with which I put forward the analysis of the showthat fits perfectly in the change
situation of global capitalism and the disappearance of the Berlin Wall and
East and West Europe.

FIRST: The
invitation for the exhibition did not mention one single name of the included
artists. Something that is not possible to be a case when it is Western artists
taking part in the show. One of the reasons was that more than 200 artists were
invited. As the producer of the show is ERSTE
Foundation it is not
possible to think that an extra sheet of paper for the invitation could not be
provided with the names! Money was never a question in this show, only when it
was about artists to be paid as taking part in the show and obviously when it
was necessary to publish the names of the artists on the invitation card. The
artists in the show were not paid, we the panelists, were. But what was even
more disturbing was the fact that the press material listed a selection of
names, in the way, as noted by Austrian artist Ralo Mayer, artists make their
CV’s saying “solo shows, selection.” Therefore, for ERSTE, MUMOK and the curator,
the selected artists’ names from the former Eastern European space were (are to
be in the future) taken/included/excluded as depending of the contexts for
which the different institutions need their CV’s.

What is
described here is not a joke, unfortunately, but can be theoretically
envisioned in the following way. One of the most challenging presentation at
the symposium part of the exhibition Gender check was by Vjollca
Krasniqi ( theoretician from Prishtina, Kosovo). Krasniqi in her talk with the
title “Returning the Gaze:
Gender and Power in Kosovo ” presented a
reading of the neocolonial capture of Kosovo by the European Union. Her
analysis showed that the processes of discrimination, racialization and etc.
that are presently implemented by the EU in/on Kosovo are all because of
“emancipation.” Krasniqi argued that discrimination imposed on
Kosovo by the EU is seen as necessary by the EU in order for Kosovars, as
analysed by Krasniqi, to become “mature
political subjects” ready for being integrated in the future in the EU. She
presented clearly that becoming mature for the EU is possible only through
changing Kosovo into a neoliberal capitalist protectorate. Similarly, I can
state that the only few selected mentioned names of Eastern European artists
taking part in the exhibition Gender check were done on the presupposition that they were
enough mature (“mature EU artists”) to be listed as part of different CV’s of
different institutions (Erste, MUMOK, the curator), depending on different purposes of these CV’s. Therefore we could
see our names depending on the fact whether we were enough gender (?),
politically(?) and historically (?) mature subjects (ops!) artists for them.

More
poignantly, I can state that the exhibition Gender
check, referring to Arjun
Appadurai,[3] (quoted in Goldie Osuri), presents a
juncture of a certain epistemology of constructing a certain space of
visibility for the unnamed lets say 180 artists (20 was named depending of the
context) in the show (let be at least for a moment sympathetic to the show)
with a colonial govermentality at its purest (if we think about how the
exhibition is constructed). Appadurai talks already in 1993 of a specific way
of constituting the colony with what he names enumerative community. What I
want to say? As it was repeated over and over from the opening speeches on, Gender check
is not about East and West of Europe (and therefore the word in the title of
the exhibition is a mistake) but is about an exhibition project that pushes
forward a colonial logic of producing an enumerative community (200 and more
artists that present 400 and more works, while the curator argued it could be
even more, but MUMOK is too small!) that takes statistics as its politics of
representation. In this show some bodies, and let be precise nameless bodies (the invitation that was sent to “everybody,” so to say, did not list
one single artist’s name, beside the author of the invitation cover picture)
are taken to stand for other bodies because of the enumerative principle of
metonymy. By the way, metaphor and metonymy were used as the logic to produce
meaning through the show, bypassing the social and political.[4] Just to make a clear comment, the leaflet
for the invitation to the symposium that was constituted by positions coming
from the East and the West was with names; they were listed fully and
accurately. It would not be possible to invite speakers from Austria or
(former) West Europe and not have them listed! The enumerative logic
implemented in the construction of the show is as well coming near to a logic
of constituting protectorates and zones of control. It is a process that I will
term, in regard to Suvendrini Perera[5] as a form of neoliberal govermentality
that can be named as genderization. This technical and political term
resembling at once precarization and proletarization presents not a simple “gendering”
process (as becoming) but a brutal colonial logic of forced subjugation of
whole territories and art and social practices to a gender administrative logic
of counting nameless bodies in order to be governed in the future properly.

SECOND: It
was repeated over and over that the exhibition is not about East and West of
Europe as that they are not existent any more. Though it must be clear that it
is a paradoxical statement by the curator and those who gave the money and as
well many speakers in the panel, as the title of the show is Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in
the Art of Eastern Europe. But still, what is the logic that organizes such
statement and also what means to declare that the borders are gone?

I propose here a thesis that today the
so-called misbalance between East and West of Europe is not any more a question
of opposition as it was in the past but East of Europe and West of Europe are
today in a relation of repetition.
The same repetition I put forward when talking about global capitalism that is,
according to Petit, nothing more than the repetition
of one and only event, and this is the unrestrainment
of capital. However, this repetition is not going
on as a process of mirroring, but presents a repetition of one part within the
other. Today there is a lot of talk going on between the so called nationalistic
Eastern Europe and the neoliberal Western Europe. But we witness a repetition
of the neoliberal capitalist West (with all the prerogatives of consumerism and
humanism) amidst the nationalistic East without the West consumerism/capitalist
expropriation being really jeopardized. Or another excellent case of such a
repetition is the project Former West started in The Netherlands as International
Research, Publishing and Exhibition Project 2009–2012, curated by Charles
Esche, Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhombergn (http://www.formerwest.org), that is not at
all a joke although it could be seen as such, but is a perfect logic of
repetition as the key logic of global capitalism today.

Based on Ugo Vlaisavljević’s text with the
title “From Berlin to Sarajevo,”[6]
I can state that the proclamation of the fall of the Berlin Wall, therefore of
the border of division in between East and West that is gone (what is true), and
can be so cheerfully celebrated, has to do with the wrong (old) conceptualization
of the border itself.

Maybe it is necessary to rethink the
concept of the border anew and see what the present celebration means? Ugo
Vlaisaljević refers to Étienne Balibar in order to point the finger to a
process in Europe that states that the way of how we perceive borders changes
and with this change we can conceptualize as well Europe differently.
Vlaisavljević states that the best way to understand the position within the EU
is actually to look towards the borders that are established by the EU with
those states that are not (yet?) reintegrated in the EU. Balibar already in the
1990s (as redeveloped in Vlaisavljević) in his major works about Europe
identifies a process that at once notes a fragmentation of borders resulting in
their multiplication on one side and on the other in the disappearance of
certain borders. In 1997, Balibar writes the following, my translation: “The
borders are shivering, but this does not mean that they are disappearing. On
the contrary they are multiplied and diminished in their localization, in their
function, stretching or doubled, becoming zones, regions, border territories in
which we dwell and live. Precisely the relation in between ‘borders’ and
‘territories’ is reversed. That means that they started to be the object of
requirements and contestation, insisting on their fortification and especially
on their security measures.”[7]

What is at stake in this process is what
Balibar terms as the transformation of the border into zone. The consequences
are more than just a monopoly play; this means that with this act of
constituting zones or territories instead of fixed borders the question of
borders disappears in order that the physiognomy of borders changes radically.
We do not talk about East and West of Europe any more but about the
transformation of a whole territory into a zone that functions in such a way as
a (new) border. The West Balkan is such a border zone.

If we take this point that was almost
prematurely developed in the 1990s while today it is coming to its full power,
then it is, in relation to the exhibition Gender
check, not only insulting to talk about Eastern and Western Europe,
especially about former Eastern Europe as we have its distorted image anyway
today in the format of its repetition as the Former West, but it is necessary
to imply that Gender check presents a
process of genderization as a zoning. It constitutes Former Eastern Europe as a
border zone, transforming it in a polygon for testing the level of
genderization of the whole territory. Especially we can state this as we know
that gender got its perverse condition of reality through its neoliberal
managerial appropriation in the way of gender mainstreaming in the West.
Therefore the anniversary is commemorating a
wall that is from paper as other walls made of still and concrete are
built not at the border but inside the very territory.

Therefore when it was rhetorically
asked in one of the panel at the symposium, part of the exhibition Gender Check, “Can Gender Speak East?,”
those who will respond affirmatively are those who do not understand the
changes that affected former Eastern Europe, or Europe as such. As the shifting
of the border into zone implies that the border is not a line, not even a wall
(and therefore the fall of the Berlin Wall can be cherished so
enthusiastically), but the border presents today a whole zone, gender is such a
zone! Therefore when the exhibition Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe commemorates the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not about East and West, but
it is about the transformation of the whole territory of former Eastern Europe
into a polygon for checking gender. This is why the other panel at the same
symposium organized by the western participants used the title “Fuck your
Gender” as for the radicalized queer position gender mainstreaming means the
complicity of gender that was a political category with neoliberal global
capitalism. The former Eastern Europe is still to be emancipated through the
implementation of gender, checking means precisely that capitalist
govermentality is to manage the whole space through a gender border-zone. In
her text “Where is the Feminist Critical Subject?” Biljana Kašić[8]
states that in order to formulate this new situation from her own context that
is “political, transitional, post-Yugoslav, ‘European-promising,’ gender
mainstreaming, vulgar capitalist-oriented,” it is necessary to emphasize “three
ordering systems that are at play today in feminism and Europe: gender
mainstreaming, capital order and the market-consumer dictate, including control
over representation.” I presented them already, showing that the exhibition Gender check tries to blur them, making
all of them not possible to be identified. However, my point is that gender
check is gender mainstreaming, that capital order is the shift from borders to
zones as well as the co-propriety of capital and power (Erste/MUMOK/the
institution of the curator), and that the control over representation is done
through an enumerative logic as a new juncture in-between neoliberal capitalist
epistemology and neoliberal capitalist governmentality.

Therefore, precisely through this
process of reversal of borders into territories or zones, we can claim that the
borders are disappearing for the need of imperialism of circulation, allowing
us to cheerfully greet the fall of the Berlin Wall, as this wall is a paper
wall, transformed into a zone that will be repeated as border elsewhere.
Balibar stated that the Berlin Wall is gone, while instead we got a
bureaucratic process of visa acquiring, and the border police is not any more
at the border but in the very heart of the city that is not yet part of the EU,
where in fortified offices, as reported by Vlaisavljević, policemen instead of
once embassy and consular bureaucrats keep the wall standing firmly. Today the
former Western European states’ embassies personnel, as noted by Vlaisavljević,
are more and more professional bureaucratic police. Vlaisavljević also stated
that the integration into EU starts before the future EU member state is
integrated. In short, as lucidly pointed out by Vlaisavljević, Europe does not
need the Berlin Wall as it established invisible internal judicial, police,
managerial borders that function as outside walls.

Yes, as it is said in the 2009 slogan of the unified Germany: “Come,
come to the country without borders,” but only as long as you are not in one of
the many detention prisons or camps in Germany or Former West Europe or waiting
somewhere in the line to get the visa or the asylum paper.